Failing Up in ObamaCare The IRS Hires the Contractor That Built the Health Law Website.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/failing-up-in-obamacare-1422490370
So what does it take to ruin your reputation around Washington these days? The question comes to mind after learning that one of the capitol’s most corrupt bureaucracies has decided to hire one of its most incompetent contractors—and the answer explains a lot about accountability in government.
Only days after the Internal Revenue Service announced that it would throttle back tax-season customer service in retaliation for modest budget cuts, the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee discovered that the agency had an active $4.46 million contract with CGI Federal. You may recall that company as the same outside website-builder-for-hire that was the lead designer for the ObamaCare website rollout fiasco of 2013.
CGI’s ineptitude was too much even for the Health and Human Services Department, which defenestrated CGI in January 2014. Several states followed. In a letter to the IRS on Friday, Illinois Republican Pete Roskam deadpans, “I am concerned that just months after the HHS and Massachusetts firings, the IRS selected the same contractor to provide critical technology services related to the administration of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”
In other words, the IRS isn’t merely buying CGI’s services but, yes, rewarding the company with a new health-care consignment. Mr. Roskam is requesting more information about this consolation prize, and well he should. The law’s convoluted income-reporting provisions will make filing for people who receive insurance subsidies a special ordeal.
Perhaps CGI is still able to obtain federal business because no one has ever been punished for the worst government technology failures since the Challenger explosion. The political class would prefer to forget, but a new audit from HHS Inspector General Daniel Levinson probes what he delicately calls ObamaCare’s “inadequacies in contract planning and procurement.”
According to the report, HHS rarely obeyed the laws that govern outside hiring, such as competitive bidding and due diligence of past performance. The 33 contractors that contributed to the $800 million website reported to multiple managers and no one at HHS devised an “acquisition strategy”—also required by statute—to integrate the various pieces.
Mr. Levinson reports that in interviews with the IG HHS officials said they “perceived CGI to be the project’s lead integrator, but the company did not have the same understanding of its role. This deficiency could have been addressed through more rigorous acquisition planning, such as clearly defining roles in an acquisition strategy and in descriptions of contractors’ work.”
The officials “acknowledged that, in retrospect, the role of a lead integrator should have been given more consideration, as the Federal Marketplace [aka ObamaCare] was too complex not to have an integrator.” In the belated wisdom department, that’s one for the ages.
For its part, CGI blames the rollout disaster on HHS mismanagement and political delays, not its own mistakes. In that sense, agencies tend to get the contractor performance they deserve. Maybe the IRS and CGI are made for each other.
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